Navigate:

Text Size

I never mind flying with John McCain on tiny planes in snowy weather on windswept days. And that is because I know as long as he is on board, the plane is not going to crash.

"I don't die in a plane," McCain said to me with a smile the other day as he shoehorned himself into his seat on a small charter jet. "I know that."

The joke being that if McCain had been fated to die in a plane crash, that would have occurred on Oct. 26, 1967, when his Navy A-4 Skyhawk was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi. He survived, became a prisoner of war for six years and is now a Republican senator from Arizona running for president.

In his stump speech, McCain talks about Vietnam a little more now than he did when he first ran for president in 2000 – he finds talking about his imprisonment and torture somewhat embarrassing, though he knows its political value – but now he is emphasizing the more optimistic aspects of his imprisonment: How, when his captors would pipe American broadcasts into his cell to demonstrate how Americans had turned against the war, McCain learned from other POWs about the new governor of California, Ronald Reagan, and how he supported the troops and how he believed in a brighter, better America.

Optimism is very much on McCain's mind right now. He knows nobody gets elected to the presidency these days by being a sourpuss, and on his recent campaign swing in Iowa he was careful to show his sunnier side whenever possible.

It didn't always work, but it worked well enough. And, at the end of a long campaign day, when I found myself in an elevator with him in the Radisson Hotel in Davenport, Iowa, I mentioned to him that his appearances seemed to get stronger as the day went on.

He agreed and said that was because he was finding his groove once again. "I am a little rusty," he said. "I haven't done this in awhile."

Campaigning for president is an acquired skill, and you don't really get that many chances at it. So this time around, McCain is not running the free-form campaign that he ran in 2000.

Back then, he ran a maverick campaign that, like all maverick campaigns, was prepared for everything but success.

After McCain beat George W. Bush in New Hampshire by 18 points, McCain became a target. And the Bush forces stopped McCain in his tracks in South Carolina in one of the dirtiest presidential primaries in modern times.

So today, McCain is trying to prepare for everything, though some things, such as the Iraq war, for whom he has become the poster boy, are beyond his control.

As soon as we were airborne, the conversation turned to Iraq and what would happen if the 21,500-person troop surge does not work. Would McCain like to send even more troops?

"I would love to send more," McCain said. "I wish there were more. It's taken us five months to get five brigades (designated for Iraq). I also wonder about the patience of the American people, whether we would have that option."

Though the war is unpopular with the nation as a whole, it is less unpopular with Republicans, especially the Republican activists who tend to dominate primaries and caucuses. McCain is also helped by the fact that his two chief opponents, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, have virtually the same position on Iraq as McCain.

On the plane, I suggested to McCain that perhaps the best thing that could happen to him politically would be for the Democratic Congress to end the war before November 2008.

McCain disagreed. "The scenario (for withdrawal) is so cataclysmic, I have no idea how it would play out on the political front," he said.

But wouldn't a cataclysm in Iraq make voters want a president with strong national defense experience? I asked.

"Maybe they would want a person who's gonna just say, 'We are withdrawing to the borders of the United States of America, and we're not going to fool around,' " McCain said.

Asked how long the American public would tolerate the war, McCain replied: "I think it depends to a large degree on casualties. I really do."

McCain said that "if we could show some progress" in Iraq, with the Iraqi army taking a more active role and the U.S. casualty rate dropping, anti-war sentiment in America might diminish considerably.

He also said he could not predict how the war would affect his chances for the presidency.

"If we are starting to show success (in Iraq), then obviously the fact that I supported (the war) is good," McCain said. "But if it continues to deteriorate, then it's (going to be) hard."

I said that it must be difficult knowing that his political future might not be in his own hands.

"Yep, that's why I can't worry about it and I don't worry about it," he said. "Nothing I can do about it."

If the war was not problem enough, in the opinion of some analysts, McCain is far more vulnerable in the Republican primaries on the issue of immigration and his support for a guest worker program for illegal immigrants.

That is an issue on which other Republican candidates can flank him to the right. Last March, at a Republican straw poll in Memphis, Mitt Romney threw a little red meat to the crowd by saying: "Can our borders be closed to the best and brightest, but be totally open to those without skills and education?"

Which means Romney is not going to be asked to head the GOP's Hispanic outreach effort, but that line might play well in many parts of the country.

And you can tell McCain's campaign is worried about that, because

McCain's stump speech is now filled with very tough talk about illegal immigration.

"We must secure our borders; they are broken," McCain said in Davenport. “We've seen the devastating effects of illegal immigration. We can't have people living in the country illegally. We're going to have to have a humane approach to this problem, but we certainly can't have people living in our country illegally, because it makes it more difficult for people to come to our country legally, the way that most of our parents and forebears came to this country."

McCain is hoping that before the primaries roll around next year, Congress will actually pass an immigration reform bill. "I would love to get legislation done," he said. "I think the president wants it done, and most Democrats want it done."

McCain also was careful to emphasize that all of our problems are going to work out just fine.

Why?

"Because I believe in America and the future of America," he said. "We are going to get it right. We are still the strongest nation in the world; we are still the best nation in the world."

The campaign is just beginning and more changes and style-shifts will come, but there is one thing I think McCain is dead wrong about.

"I feel," he said, "like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband, who said on their wedding night, 'I know what to do; I just don't know how to make it interesting.' "

I have a feeling that in the 2008 campaign, interesting is not going to be a problem.